New to this business, and I need some help/advice. If you got the patience and maturity then, awesome.

Ok so I donwloaded "guiminer 2012 02 19" and "bitcoin 0.5.2" and followed the newb guide from "Newslobster" which is this;

1. Go to www.bitcoin.org, download and install the most recent version of bitcoin (the default file path should be fine).

2. A GUI-based tool exists here which will help to speed this up and will automate a lot of the setup steps. Go to the linked forum thread, download and extract the archive somewhere, and then run guiminer.exe.

3. From the GUIMiner interface, click solo utilities → set bitcoin client path. Point the dialog box to bitcoin.exe; likely located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin\bitcoin.exe or C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\bitcoin.exe. Next click solo utilities → create solo password. Pick anything arbitrary for username and password but remember it, as you will need to use this later. Then finally you want to click solo utilities → launch bitcoin client as server.

This will launch bitcoin ready to be mined with, you must first wait for all the blocks to be downloaded before you can start to mine, and this may take several hours; you can view the current block count here.

4. Once all the blocks are downloaded, select solo from the server drop down box, then enter the username and password that you used before, then click start mining. Congratulations, you are now mining for bitcoins I did all that and got it to work successfully but from what I understand it's gonna take forever just for a few coins ! So I went to another guide on "Newslobster" called "How to setup pooled bitcoin mining in Windows" and ran into some trouble near the end.

I made it as far as this step:

Right click somewhere and create a new text document, then rename it to something to indicate that this will be for starting up pooled mining; also make sure that you use the .bat extension. This is going to be mostly the same process as setting up the miner to connect to your local bitcoin node, but this batch script will have new arguments for --host and --port. Given the example username, worker login suffix, and worker password from step 4, this is what should be in your batch file:

Now that you have all of that out of the way, you can just double click on this batch script to launch it. You should see it start up as normal and display your hashrate, <---- THIS DID NOT WORK EXACTLY

The .bat file launched and the command counsle appeared for a split second but that was IT. Now what ?